A data warehouse provides an environment within which all of a company's data is contained, managed analyzed and presented to members of the business. Enterprise applications increasingly use the contents of the data warehouse. Methods of communication include online with access for human interaction and web services access for business to business interaction. As the number of these interactions increases, the load on the data warehouse increases.
There is a need to prioritize and partition access to the finite resources of a data warehouse environment. Where multiple enterprise applications co-exist on a single data warehouse there is the potential for conflict for the available resources of the data warehouse. These conflicts are addressed by partitioning processing capability between the different business groups of the organization that own the individual enterprise applications. Each business group contributes to the cost of the data warehouse and is apportioned an appropriate amount of the daily capacity and data processing capability of the data warehouse.
Where the enterprise applications exist as separate entities on a single enterprise data warehouse, each application is responsible for its own use of the data warehouse and the associated costs.
One problem arises where one application provides access to its online capabilities to a second enterprise application. This configuration pushes the responsibility, authority and financial penalty for accessing the enterprise data warehouse onto the enterprise application that provides the service. This approach places a great deal of responsibility upon the called enterprise application while allowing the calling enterprise application to divest responsibility for the processing of the potentially expensive query within the enterprise data warehouse.